Tag Archives: tournament

Only Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon game cards or downloadable versions are permitted.

Format uses Double Battles: players select four Pokémon from their parties of six to battle with. At the start of the battle, players send out the first two Pokémon in their party, making a total of four Pokémon on the battlefield. Gameplay continues until all of one player’s Pokémon faint.

Pokémon

Players may use Pokémon from the Alola Pokédex, from No. 001–204, 206-288, and 293-299, that are caught or hatched in the game, or received at an official event or distribution.

Only the Alola Formes of Pokémon with regional variants may be used.

Pokémon must have a black clover in the Pokémon summary screen to indicate that the Pokémon was acquired in Generation VII.

Pokémon may have Hidden Abilities.

Pokémon may only use moves acquired in normal gameplay or from an official event or promotion.

The levels of all Pokémon will be set to 50 for the duration of battle.

A player’s team cannot contain two Pokémon with the same Pokédex number or nickname.

A player’s team cannot contain a Pokémon nicknamed with the name of another Pokémon (for example, an Unfezant named “Pidove”), or anything potentially offensive.

Items

Players may use items that have been acquired in normal gameplay or from an official event or promotion.

Each Pokémon on a player’s team can hold an item, though no two Pokémon may hold the same item.

Like this:

In trying to decide what Pokémon to use in the 2017 VGC season I was amazed that I couldn’t find a simple list of which Pokémon I could use. Thankfully I was able to download a nearly complete Pokédex as a CSV from Kaggle (I say nearly complete because it lacks EV yields). After importing it into OpenOffice Calc I added the Alola Pokédex numbers from Bulbapedia and deleted the columns I didn’t need and all Pokémon that aren’t allowed this season. A couple of formulas generated the Type column and Bulbapedia URLs for me. Then it was just a bit of Regex magic in EditPad to convert the revised CSV to Markdown, and WordPress.com did the rest.

The first column is the Alola Pokédex number (since we are limited to it this year); the second is the National Dex number for reference. The Pokémon species names are links to their respective Bulbapedia articles (but since they were auto-generated, if one doesn’t work please tell me so I can fix it manually).

Only Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire game cards or downloadable versions are permitted.

Format uses Double Battles: each player selects four Pokémon from his or her party of six. At the start of the battle, players send out the first two Pokémon in their party, making a total of four Pokémon on the battlefield. Gameplay continues until a player makes all four of the opponent’s Pokémon faint.

Pokémon players may use Pokémon from the National Pokédex, from No. 001–719, that are caught in the game, transferred from a previous Pokémon title, or received at an official event or distribution.

The following Pokémon may not be on a player’s team:

151 – Mew

490 – Manaphy

647 – Keldeo

251 – Celebi

491 – Darkrai

648 – Meloetta

385 – Jirachi

492 – Shaymin

649 – Genesect

386 – Deoxys

493 – Arceus

719 – Diancie

489 – Phione

494 – Victini

720 – Hoopa

A player’s Battle Box may not contain more than two of the following Pokémon:

150 – Mewtwo

384 – Rayquaza

644 – Zekrom

249 – Lugia

483 – Dialga

646 – Kyurem

250 – Ho-Oh

484 – Palkia

716 – Xerneas

382 – Kyogre

487 – Giratina

717 – Yveltal

383 – Groudon

643 – Reshiram

718 – Zygarde

Pokémon must be placed in the Battle Box.

Pokémon are allowed to Mega Evolve.

Pokémon above level 50 are permitted, but they are auto‐leveled down to 50 for the duration of battle.

Players may use Pokémon with Hidden Abilities.

A player’s team cannot contain two Pokémon with the same Pokédex number.

A player’s team cannot contain two Pokémon with the same nickname.

A player’s team cannot contain a Pokémon nicknamed with the name of another Pokémon (for example, an Unfezant named “Pidove”).

Pokémon must have a blue pentagon in the Pokémon summary screen to indicate that the Pokémon was acquired in Generation VI.

Items

Pokémon may not hold the item Soul Dew.

Players may use items that have been officially released via Pokémon X, Pokémon Y, Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon Alpha Sapphire, the Pokémon Global Link, or an official event or promotion.

Each Pokémon on a player’s team can hold an item, though no two Pokémon may hold the same item.

Moves

Pokémon may only use moves that have been learned through one of the following methods:

By leveling up

By TM or HM

As an Egg Move, through breeding

From a character in the game

A move already known by a Pokémon received at an official Pokémon event or promotion

Match Resolution

A player wins by knocking out his or her opponent’s final Pokémon.

If a player’s final Pokémon used Selfdestruct, Explosion, Destiny Bond, or Final Gambit, and both players’ final Pokémon faint as a result, the player who used the move loses that game.

If a player’s final Pokémon used Double‐Edge, Volt Tackle, Flare Blitz, Take Down, Submission, Brave Bird, Wood Hammer, Head Smash, Struggle, Head Charge, or Wild Charge, or was holding Life Orb, and both players’ final Pokémon faint as a result, the player who used the move wins that game.

If both players’ final Pokémon faint due to a weather condition, such as Hail or Sandstorm, the player whose Pokémon faints last wins the game. This includes the effects of Perish Song.

If a Pokémon’s Ability (such as Rough Skin, Aftermath, Liquid Ooze, or Iron Barbs) or held item (such as Rocky Helmet) results in both players’ final Pokémon fainting, the player whose Pokémon had the Ability or held item wins the game.

A player who selects “Run” during a battle will count as the loser of that game, whether selected intentionally or not. Players may not intentionally play a match to a tie nor agree to record a match as a tie without playing.

Tie-Breakers

Should the time limit expire before a player makes his or her opponent’s final Pokémon faint, the winner of the game is determined based on the criteria below.

Remaining Pokémon
a. If one player has more remaining Pokémon than the other, that player wins the game.
b. If both players have the same number of Pokémon remaining, the result of the game is determined by average percentage of HP remaining, as described below.

Average Percentage of HP Remaining
a. If one player’s team has a higher average percentage of HP remaining, that player wins the game.
b. If both players’ teams have the same average percentage of HP remaining, the result of the game is determined by amount of HP remaining, as described below.

Amount of Total HP Remaining
a. If one player’s team has a higher total HP remaining, that player wins the game.
b. If both players’ teams have the same total HP remaining, the result of the game is a tie.

Technical Issues

Over the course of a tournament, a player’s game connection may become disrupted in a number of ways.

Single Frozen Game State

If one player’s game system is stuck in an unfixable frozen game state, the player whose game system is frozen will receive a game loss.

Double Frozen Game State

If both players’ game systems are stuck in an unfixable frozen game state and it cannot be determined which player’s game or system is responsible for the frozen state, both players will receive a tie for that game.

Game State Disruption

Players should attempt to fix any game disruption by checking their 3DS systems and making sure they are aligned properly. If issues persist, contact a judge for immediate assistance. If consistent disruptions are determined to be due to actions on the part of a player, the judge may issue an appropriate penalty as outlined in the Pokémon Penalty Guidelines.

I finally got my Pokémon Tournament Deck List Sheet ready for the 2016 season. It took me ages because I ended up having to completely rebuild it. If you are coming to the Asheville Mossdeep League Challenge on September 12th, we are holding a raffle and giving a second entry to anyone who arrives with an already filled out deck list – but you don’t have to use mine, of course.

OpenOffice Writer sucks at making tables. (Someone once asked me how I managed to make my character sheets in Writer because of that fact, and I pointed him to the wonders of frames, which allow Writer to function like a low-end desktop publishing program.) That’s why I always make tables in Calc and then paste them into frames in Writer. For whatever reason, the set symbol images kept not being copied even though they are anchored to and entirely contained by their respective cells.

After that I decided to try and make the whole document in Calc since the deck list is essentially a bunch of tables anyway, but the varying numbers of columns made it overly complicated, so I went back to Writer and manually copied in the errant images.

That did the trick at the time, and adding new sets was a breeze, but then came rotation. That required moving a bunch of sets from one table to the other, manually moving their set symbols again. I briefly tried to make the thing entirely in Writer, but ran into the Writer sucks at tables problem again.

That left going back and trying to make the whole thing in Calc again. I’m not totally happy with the result, but it’s complete, and that’s good enough for Saturday’s League Challenge. Getting the underlines the right length took a lot of fiddling, but not nearly as much as making the set symbols actually stay in their boxes after PDF exportation. I still don’t know why that kept happening – they looked perfect in Calc, but kept being misaligned enough to partially or fully obscure the lines between them as a PDF. I use Sumatra, Foxit, and PDF-XChange Editor for different purposes*, but the problem showed up in all three, so I knew the error didn’t lie with the rendering engine. By adjusting the positions and sometimes sizes of the images by hundredths of an inch and then re-exporting it, I finally got it, but it took me a couple of hours for just that process.

I don’t like how long the top frame is to the player name field, but fixing it will require another rebuild. If it proves to not be a problem on Saturday then I’ll probably leave it alone. Otherwise I’ll finish a project I started some months back and start with a blank sheet where every row and column is .1″ and then combine them as needed to make the tables and fields, just like I did for my GURPS character creator and library spreadsheets.

So, despite how much harder it can be to position things precisely in Calc (which is the reason I built it in Writer in the first place), I managed to get it done in plenty of time for our next tournament, and set things up so that adapting to next year’s rotation will be a breeze.

∗ Sumatra PDF is my everyday PDF and CB7 reader, but does odd things with margins when printing, and is very limited in features by design.Foxit Reader was my old go-to reader, but tends to eat a lot of memory, but also allows me to edit bookmarks, unlike Sumatra, and access other advanced features of PDFs.PDF-XChange Editor is now the last stage of all of my PDFs before I upload them. It allows me to change metadata and all kinds of other advanced editing that I otherwise can’t do with free software, but is overkill most of the time.

Like this:

I have updated my tournament deck list sheet for the 2016 Play! Pokémon season. I am only about halfway done making a form-fillable version since I’m learning how as I go along. Since no sets will be rotating out of Expanded, I’ll have to do a major rebuild of that section of the sheet since I’m still having trouble getting OpenOffice to properly attach set symbols to cells so they aren’t left behind when I copy the table into Writer. That said, I hope to have the post-rotation form-fillable version available for our Mossdeep League Challenge.

Speaking of the Mossdeep LC, we are giving out door prizes at this event. Each registered player will get one entry, and anyone who arrives at the store with a pre-filled out deck sheet gets a bonus entry. Details can be found on the tournament’s facebook event. The overhaul to the Professor program is leaving us with fewer prizes than we had hoped, so we’re happy to accept donations if you have anything suitable lying around.

Since I’ve been running Pokémon League Challenges (our next one is 20th Dec 2014), I’ve had no end of issues with deck registration sheets. For one thing, it takes ages before anyone uploads one after a new set releases. More annoying to me as TO (tournament organizer) is that all of the available sheets use American civilian–standard middle-endian dates, but the Pokémon website and tournament software both use the Internet-standard big-endian dates (fun fact: most countries in the world use little-endian dates, as I did above), so adding new players to the software is a bigger hassle than it needs to be – especially with my oft pain-fogged mind.

So it took me several months, especially since I had to track down the official abbreviation and set symbol for Phantom Forces, but I finally finished my own deck registration sheet. Further complicating things is a strange problem I was having with OpenOffice, but I’ll cover that in its own section later.

The first obvious difference you’ll see is that it has the set symbols and abbreviations for every set currently legal in both Standard and Expanded events, with a separate table for each format. That way you don’t need two different registration sheets if you run or attend events using both formats. At the WNC Pokémon League, for instance, we alternate the two formats from season to season.

As with everything I intend to be printed out by end users, I designed it to use as little as ink as possible. That’s why the table that lists all of the Standard-legal set symbols and abbreviations ends with several blank lines, intended to serve two purposes. The first is to eliminate the need to wait for me or anyone else to add new sets by giving you space to write in newly-released sets and their abbreviations as soon as you need them. Those lines also mean that copies leftover from past events will never go to waste since up to four sets released after the sheet was printed can be added to it.

It is my intention to upload a new revision every time there is a new set release or rotation, so the link above should always lead you to the newest version.

Now my weird OpenOffice issue. If you are only here for Pokémon and have no interest in the finer points of OpenOffice, you can skip the rest of this post.

If you work with complex documents a lot, you may be aware that OO Writer is terrible at formatting tables, so it’s much, much easier to make them in Calc and paste them into Writer. Fortunately, Writer is as much a low-end desktop publishing program as it is a word processor, so it handles the insertion of layered objects very well, especially if you put all of the individual components into separate Frames like I do. As an example, the deck sheet linked above has five frames in addition to the five embedded tables. My most complicated character sheet to date, for HackMaster 5e, has 16 distinct frames in addition to inserted Calc tables.

So what was weird? When I pasted the format tables into Writer the set symbols vanished. I belatedly remembered that you can’t link* in the images if you want to copy the table to another document. So I tried embedding* a single set symbol into Calc, then copied the table into Writer. As expected, it successfully copied the embedded image but not the linked ones, so I set about replacing all of the linked images in Calc. But when I pasted the final table into Writer, it still only pasted that first embedded image.

Because Writer is so bad at tables, I decided to just make the whole thing in Calc even though Writer’s Scribus-like features make some parts of the job much easier. As expected, managing some of the fiddlier bits of arranging various elements on the page in Calc proved to be a great deal more work than in Writer, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative – until, on a whim, I tried to copy Standard table into a different sheet in the same document and was pleasantly surprised when the images actually went along for the ride.

Naturally, my next move was to try to paste it into Writer, and it worked perfectly, so I went back to designing the whole thing in Writer. Even weirder is that up until then the set symbols would all move slightly every time I opened the spreadsheet. For some unknown reason, the first time the images stayed put upon loading was the same time that they also successfully traveled from Calc to Writer. They have remained in place ever since.

So my question for you OO experts out there is: do you have any idea why all of that happened? Specifically, why couldn’t I paste the embedded images? Why would they move around randomly? And why did they suddenly start behaving?

* There are two ways of adding images to an OO document: linking and embedding. A linked image is simply referenced by the document, much like Web hyperlinks, making the resulting document much smaller, but if the document is copied to another computer then the links break so the images don’t appear. Actually embedding the images makes the document more portable, but also larger.